The Life of Françoise Sagan Reads Like a Novel

In her lifetime, Françoise Sagan (real name: Françoise Quoirez) published more than 50 works, including plays, short stories and biographies. But none was as successful as her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, written at the tender age of 17. A mere 30,000 words, Bonjour Tristesse was published in 1954 and was literally an overnight sensation, catapulting Sagan into a notoriety that lasted until the day she died. 

The book was considered scandalous and amoral, doubly so for having been written by one so young. It covers the events of one summer on the French Riviera that the heroine, Cécile, spends with her philandering father and his mistress. Cécile is discovering her own sexuality while plotting to disrupt her father’s licentious love life for her own purposes. It is a sophisticated novel for a 17-year-old, and took a short three months to complete. Sagan dropped it off at a publisher, René Julliard, in the Rue de l’Université. Beneath her name and the title of the novel, Sagan astutely typed her date of birth: 21 June 1935. It took but a few days before the telegram arrived and a contract offered. (It was reported that Sagan immediately blew the advance on whiskey and a black sweater. A foretaste of things to come.) 

The immediacy of Sagan’s success was astonishing by any standard. Within a month of the publication of Bonjour Tristesse, Sagan was lauded by Paris Match as an “18-year-old Colette,” and commended by the reigning Nobel Laureate, François Mauriac for its “explosive literary merit.”

This undiluted praise proved too much for the chief literary critic of Le Monde, Émile Henriot, who rejected the book as “immoral.” This dismissal was hardly surprising in a predominantly Catholic country as France, where as much outrage as admiration was expressed at the sexual themes of the novel written by a teenager. 

Sagan had a much more succinct take regarding her book. “I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write Bonjour Tristesse in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it. I sent it to editors. It was accepted.” 

The bistros and jazz clubs in the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés had proved irresistible to Sagan since she was 15 years old. She was no stranger to either tobacco or alcohol. Jazz, cigarettes, and alcohol remained a constant throughout Sagan’s life, despite (or because of) her traditional bourgeois upbringing. Sagan was, and remained, a rebel. 

Her father was a company director and her mother was the daughter of landowners. Born in the countryside in Cajarc in Lot in 1935, Sagan’s love of animals stayed with her all her life. After the war, her family moved to the prosperous 17th arrondissement of Paris. 

Her first school in Paris, a convent, was uniquely unsuited to the young Sagan – she was expelled for her “lack of deep spirituality.” She fared little better in the Louise-de-Bettignies school, expelled once more, this time for hanging a bust of Molière with a piece of string. Sagan wearied of formal education, only obtaining her baccalaureat at the second attempt. The success of Bonjour Tristesse, and her new life in St Germain, lessened even more her interest in studies and she did not graduate from the Sorbonne. 

Sagan was now an undisputed celebrity with a capital C and a very young celebrity at that, with suddenly money to burn. And she burned it with enthusiasm. Alongside her Left Bank apartment, Sagan bought a powerful Jaguar XK140 convertible. Her passion for fast cars never abated, despite near fatal accidents. Sagan was exhilarated by speed and the dangers it ensued. She paid the bills in restaurants for old and new friends. Money for Sagan was simply another commodity to be used indiscriminately on enjoyment for herself and whoever else was around her at the time.  

Her enthusiasm for profligate living was to prove neither a recipe for unalloyed joy nor future financial security.  

Sagan was now writing her second novel, Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile), but her phenomenal success in France had now crossed the Channel and the Atlantic, and Britain and the US had woken up to Sagan. The translation of Bonjour Tristesse into English was published in 1955. (In 1958, the British/American film, starring Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Jean Seberg, was released. A TV movie of the same name was released in 1995.) 

A Certain Smile followed a 20-year-old Sorbonne student’s affair with her boyfriend’s worldly uncle. An almost inevitable film followed in 1958, starring Joan Fontaine, Rossano Brazzi and Johnny Mathis.  

Aimez-vous Brahms? (again, made into a film in 1961 starring Ingrid Bergman, Yves Montand and Anthony Perkins) delves into the complexities of an older woman, Paula, who is the mistress of a philandering man who refuses to be faithful. When a young man falls in love with Paula and convinces her that the age difference doesn’t matter, she finally succumbs. But was it the right choice? 

Sagan’s personal life was just as tumultuous as those of her characters. 

In 1957, Sagan was in the United State, now friends with such illustrious personalities as Ava Gardner and Truman Capote. She was driving her Aston Martin sports car at great speed when she was involved in an accident which left her in a coma for some time. Undaunted by her brush with death, Sagan continued driving at speed, often in her Jaguar from Paris to Monte Carlo and its casino. 

In 1958, four years after she completed Bonjour Tristesse, Sagan married Guy Schoeller, an editor with Hachette and 20 years older than Sagan. The couple divorced two years later. Her next marriage in 1962 to Bob Westhoff, an American playboy, lasted half as long as her first but produced a son, Denis, who was born in June 1962. 

Sagan’s love life was fearlessly unconventional. She had a 10-year relationship with Peggy Roche, the fashion stylist, and later with French Playboy editor, Annick Geille. François Mitterand was a regular guest at her apartment and later in 2002, Sagan was convicted of a tax fraud involving the said former president. She received a suspended sentence. 

Through it all Sagan continued to write. Her plays did not achieve the success she had hoped for and she returned to writing novels. One can only wonder at her thoughts regarding Bonjour Tristesse— a novel swiftly written at 17 years old whose success and acclaim she could never surpass in her later years. 

Her love of whiskey and speed and gambling had been joined by her use of cocaine and later still, by heroin. When her old lover Peggy Roche died of pancreatic cancer in 1991, Sagan’s decline was noticeable. She became gaunt, and reportedly a disturbing wraith-like figure in her rare TV appearances. By 2000, her health was visibly worsening and she became a semi-recluse in the same house in Honfleur where, in the 1960s, she had hosted exuberant and extravagant parties. Those days had long disappeared. 

Sagan had lost all her money and more. When she died of a pulmonary embolism in 2004, aged 69, Sagan was in debt to the tune of one million euros. 

French President Jacques Chirac, in his memorial statement, said: “With her death, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive writers – an eminent figure of our literary life.” 

Sagan had already written her own, less effusive obituary for The Dictionary of Authors. “Appeared in 1954 with a slender novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which created a scandal worldwide. Her death, after a life and a body of work that were equally pleasant and botched, was a scandal only for herself.” 

At Sagan’s bequest, she was buried in Seuzac, closed to her beloved birthplace, Cajarc. 

Bonjour Tristesse, the slim novel that changed Sagan’s life overnight, has sold more than 2 million copies and has been translated into 20 languages.